


but my heart's my no stranger to upheaval

by Kyuu



Category: Super Junior, Super Junior-M
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Canadian Ganstas, Cohabitation, Emo Panda Shirt, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 08:12:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyuu/pseuds/Kyuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kyuhyun makes poor life decisions and Zhou Mi has an emo panda shirt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but my heart's my no stranger to upheaval

The first time Kyuhyun gets (wasted) drunk, he ends up throwing up on his R.A.'s shoes. Maybe it's because he looks so miserable hunched over the toilet bowl after that or maybe it's because he's just a pathetic freshman, but his R.A. Is nice enough not to write him up afterwards.

He does, however, end up sleeping outside on a park playground bench that night.

 

The second time he gets (horribly) drunk, it's the night before his 18th birthday and his friends don't see a reason not to (not that it ever stopped any of them before). Kyuhyun ends up finding himself in a downtown bus stop booth at three o'clock in the morning, one of his shoes missing, with no recollection of how he got there.

He has to call his roommate to pick him up, which Sungmin does only, Kyuhyun suspects, because it's his birthday.

 

The third time Kyuhyun gets (completely, totally, utterly) drunk, he's at a dirty, dark club and no amount of alcohol will seem to make the music tolerable.

"Um, hey," someone says from behind him, tapping him on the shoulder, "I don't think you should have any more."

Kyuhyun squints. That certain someone, he (that is, his extremely drunken brain) decides, is actually quite cute.

"I mean, I know I can't stop you or anything," his stranger elaborates, "But you should know that frequent binge drinking will damage your liver in the long term. Besides, this is a club - perhaps you should dance for a while before having more alcohol? Maybe?"

Kyuhyun tosses his beer can in the trash and takes that as a cue to kiss him.

(He has absolutely no memory of what happened after that, that night. Though from the smirks Sungmin keep giving him for a week afterwards, he's not completely sure he wants to know.)

(Kyuhyun does regret, just slightly, not finding out his name.)

 

Organic chemistry lab next semester: Kyuhyun wakes up from his nap eight minutes before class, and is almost late. It doesn't really matter either way because when he gets there, there's only one lab bench left.

His lab partner (his nameless stranger from the club all those months ago) smiles awkwardly and waves at him.

Oh no, Kyuhyun's brain thinks.

Hey, he's actually as cute as you remembered, the other part of his brain supplies.

Shut up, Kyuhyun tells himself.

("Oh. My. God. Mimi is your lab partner?" Sungmin laughs when Kyuhyun tells him later.

"Yes. ...Wait? What?" Kyuhyun sputters, "You know him?!"

"Of course," Sungmin scoffs. "Who doesn't know Zhou Mi? He's only the class president, not to mention in half a dozen clubs."

Kyuhyun tries to smother himself with his pillow. "I hate you. I hate everything. I hate my life.")

 

Due to his inability to deal with life, Kyuhyun decides to go out drinking that friday night. This actually happens somewhat frequently, except Kyuhyun is usually good at it so it's not really a problem. After three times, he's learned how not to be throw-up-on-your-R.A.'s-shoes in-the-middle-of-a-downtown-bus-stop-at-three-A.M. Kissing-strangers-at-sketchy-night-clubs drunk, but just happily tipsy enough.

Unfortunately, Kyuhyun's inability to deal with life also causes him to start slightly early that night, and by 9:30, he's stumbling around outside.

Now, Kyuhyun's not actually drunk - just tipsy enough to be happy - but then he can't remember if there are any laws against being happily tipsy in public and dodges into a store in the shopping center just in case.

Inside, the first thing he sees is a shirt hanging on the racks with an emo panda design. This reminds him of why he needed to have a few drinks, which in turn takes him out of his happy place because... Pandas are from China just like Zhou Mi, and Zhou Mi makes Kyuhyun upset. It all makes sense in Kyuhyun's happily tipsy mind okay don't question it.

Anyway, the only proper thing to do, Kyuhyun concludes, is to buy the shirt and give it to Zhou Mi, so that he can be just as upset as Kyuhyun.

"Sir, we're closing soon. Do you have purchases you want to ring up?"

  


Kyuhyun puts the emo panda shirt on the counter. For good measure, he gets another one just in case giving an emo panda shirt to Zhou Mi won't be enough to make him upset.

When he leaves, Kyuhyun is two emo panda shirts richer but too poor to afford transportation back to campus. He tries to call Sungmin, but after getting voice mail ten times, he scrolls down his list of contacts to see who else he can call.

Zhou Mi is the last name on his contact list. Kyuhyun's not even 100% sure how he got Zhou Mi's number (something to do with working on pre-lab questions together), but since it's his fault that Kyuhyun now had two emo panda shirts - no, actually, his fault that Kyuhyun needed to have a drink in the first place - he figures that Zhou Mi owes it to him to get him.

"Hey," he says when Zhou Mi picks up the phone. "Guess what?"

"You got drunk and made out with a stranger at a club?"

"What, no." Kyuhyun is mildly offended. He's not drunk. He doesn't even sound close to drunk, and he knows because he's worked very hard to not sound drunk even when he really was. "I bought you a shirt. It has an emo panda on it."

"Um, thank you?" Zhou Mi says.

"I bought you a shirt with an emo panda on it, and now I can't get home. Take responsibility."

"Okay," Zhou Mi says. "Where are you? I'll pick you up."

Kyuhyun's not convinced Zhou Mi will come, but Zhou Mi shows up fifteen minutes later, and Kyuhyun thinks that maybe he won't have to give Zhou Mi the emo panda shirt after all.

 

Kyuhyun doesn't wake up the next morning hungover because Zhou Mi had made sure he'd had lots of water before he went to sleep since Zhou Mi once heard hangovers were mostly caused by dehydration anyway.

He does, however, wake up in Zhou Mi's bed which is many parts more horrifying and terrible. On the way back, Kyuhyun had realized he didn't have his key and still couldn't contact Sungmin, and Zhou Mi figured it'd be a waste to let Kyuhyun sleep outside since he'd already gone through the trouble of getting him back to campus.

Of course, Zhou Mi only had one bed, and since Kyuhyun was his guest, he'd insisted Kyuhyun sleep on the bed and he'd slept on the couch in the living room.

"Hey," Zhou Mi says, way too smiley and cheerful for the bright and early hour of eleven on a saturday morning. "How do you feel?"

"Like I shouldn't have bought two panda shirts last night."

"Oh! Thank you for the shirt, by the way. I like it a lot."

Kyuhyun stares. "I bought that shirt to make you upset. Because... You make me upset, and that shirt reminded me of you," he tries to explain. Though now that he's no longer happily tipsy, Kyuhyun can’t follow his own train of thought from last night anymore.

"Um, okay," Zhou Mi says, confused. "It's still a very nice shirt, though. I was a little skeptical when you first told me you bought me a shirt, considering your... But it's actually a nice shirt."

It takes Kyuhyun a moment to follow where that "Considering your" was going. "Hey!" he protests. "My clothes are just fine, okay. And I don't make fun of your accent even though it's stupid."

Zhou Mi frowns. "rude. Especially considering what I did for you last night. I'll consider it fair payment for occupying my usual sleeping space then."

Kyuhyun gets up to leave.

"By the way, don't forget we have to work on the lab write-up before thursday," Zhou Mi calls out after him.

("Cute!" Sungmin squeals later.

"Shut up," Kyuhyun says. "It's not cute, and we didn't do anything, okay."

"No, but seriously," Sungmin says, "Are you going to keep the other shirt?"

"...I can't find the receipt," Kyuhyun says.)

 

Zhou Mi wears the shirt to their library meeting.

They get interrupted every five minutes or so.

"Hey Zhou Mi, nice shirt! Where'd you get it?"

"I don't know, ask Kuixian. He's the one who got it for me."

"...Who's Kuixian?"

"Oh, my lab partner - Ku- Kyuhyun." Zhou Mi gestures towards him.

Kyuhyun resists the urge to introduce his face to the table, if only because their lab paper is on it and he's slightly afraid of the chemical stains that'd spilled onto the paper from the experiment.

 

They end up going to the same party the next weekend.

"I thought you didn't drink," Kyuhyun says.

"I never said that. I just advocate for drinking responsibly." Zhou Mi shrugs.

Kyuhyun ends up spending most of the party avoiding him, and tries to go home early, but he ends up sitting on the steps of the frat house twenty minutes later.

"What's wrong?" Zhou Mi says, sitting down next to him.

"I've been sexsiled from my apartment by my roommate," Kyuhyun answers.

"Ouch." Zhou Mi pauses. "Wait, you live in an actual apartment, don't you? With a separate living room and doors and everything? He sexsiled you from the entire apartment?"

"No, but I don't want to hear Sungmin making sex noises," Kyuhyun says flatly.

"Oh." Zhou Mi coughs. "Um, you can come stay with me again if you want."

Kyuhyun stares at him like he's grown another head.

"...Do I have to buy you another panda shirt?" he asks after a moment.

"You could offer to do the lab write-up," Zhou Mi says.

"No."

"Ah, well, that's fine too."

They end up sharing the bed this time because Kyuhyun doesn't want to buy Zhou Mi another panda shirt, and when he wakes up in the morning, he realizes that Zhou Mi's bed maybe isn't that small after all.

("Aah~!" Sungmin says. "Then what happened?"

"I'm going to kill you," Kyuhyun says. "And you are never allowed to have sex again.")

 

Somehow, this ends up happening several more times against Kyuhyun's will, mostly, he suspects, because Zhou Mi lives exactly five minutes closer to Kyuhyun's favorite bar than he does. Which, admittedly, isn't that much closer but at three in the morning, Kyuhyun would rather not walk those five minutes.

After the second time, he tries to sleep on Zhou Mi's couch since he figures it'd be rude to keep throwing Zhou Mi out of his own bed, but then Zhou Mi's roommate - some Taiwanese-Canadian kid named Herry or something - keeps waking him up before a normal, sane, human hour, like 1pm or something.

"Oh God, you're here again. I feel like you should pay rent," Herry says to him.

"Canada doesn't have gangsters, okay, stop lying to yourself. I'm not giving in to your intimidation tactics," Kyuhyun replies.

After a while, there's a few times when Zhou Mi tries to convince him that there are other things to do on a friday night than drinking, and proceeds to drag him shopping. This always ends up with a lot of "Are you blind that is so ugly seriously you have much better fashion taste when you're drunk"'s and "Do I look I like I care and I thought the point of this was to prove that there are things to do other than drinking"'s.

Or they'll decide to stay in and Kyuhyun and Herry soundly crush Zhou Mi at video games or when they celebrate after a hard week of tests together over a bottle of vodka and Kyuhyun says, "Aren't you s'posed to be stopping me from making bad decisions?" and Zhou Mi says, "It's not a bad decision if we're both drunk."

And maybe, sometimes, there are a few sloppy, drunken kisses just like the first time they met. But Kyuhyun glosses over that, because they're really minor details - just things that tended to happen when you're drunk, yeah.

At some point, Kyuhyun ends up taking some of his stuff over to Zhou Mi's apartment because Zhou Mi lives closer to the engineering department than he does, and also the library. Kyuhyun maybe not-so-secretly has apartment envy and kind-of-secretly plots to evict Herry out of the apartment so he can have his room.

("Aw, Henry is cute. I wouldn't mind keeping him. Maybe I can help you."

"...Who the fuck is Henry?")

 

Then, one time, Zhou Mi does their laundry.

Well, more precisely his and Herry's laundry, and Kyuhyun supposes he should be more grateful, but mostly he just lets Zhou Mi do it because he wouldn't stop complaining about how neither of them have washed their own clothes in like three weeks and how it would make the apartment smell bad.

And he is sort of kind of grateful until the next day when Kyuhyun has a class that started approximately two minutes ago and doesn't have any clothes.

He scowls as he digs through the drawers for something. Surely Zhou Mi hadn't washed everything right? He'd only worn that Protoss shirt like one time, it was still practically clean.

Kyuhyun pulls out his emo panda shirt and frowns. He'd forgotten about that. Or not really forgotten because it wasn't like Zhou Mi had stopped wearing the shirt because he hadn't. Kyuhyun had just erased from his memory that he bought two.

He shrugs it on anyway because two minutes ago is starting to become five.

 

 

"Nice shirt," Changmin snickers when he he sees him after class. "You decided to raid Zhou Mi's closet today?"

"He did my laundry against my will," Kyuhyun replies nonchalantly. "Besides, this one is my shirt. I bought two."

Changmin makes a face. "You're like those disgusting couples with matching shirts and all." He points to a small blue paint spot on the shirt. "But I’m still pretty sure this is his shirt though. That's from when his a capella group was painting a banner for their concert last week."

Kyuhyun frowns. It couldn't be Zhou Mi's shirt right? It takes him a moment to realize he never even brought his panda shirt from his apartment because he never wanted to see it again much less wear it.

Oh God he was wearing Zhou Mi's shirt. And thought it was his shirt. The only reason he'd think one of Zhou Mi's shirts was his own would be if he thought all his stuff was at Zhou Mi's apartment, which would mean he was living in Zhou Mi's apartment. He's seen Herry more times this week than he's seen Sungmin. Actually, Sungmin didn't even ask him to pay his part of the rent for last month.

"...I'm going to find a nice corner so I can have an emotional breakdown now," Kyuhyun says.

"Okay, you go do that," Changmin says.

 

Kyuhyun just finishes having his crisis when Zhou Mi gets back from his environmental club meeting.

"Have you eaten yet?" Zhou Mi asks as he toes off his shoes.

"You moved me into your apartment without my permission!" Kyuhyun accuses, ignoring the fact he was trying to get rid of Herry anyway.

Zhou Mi pauses for a moment. "Um, I was thinking thai, if you're up for it," he says, apparently now used to Kyuhyun's occasional bizarre, unrelated commentary.

Then it hits Kyuhyun. "Did you start dating me without my permission too?" he asks.

"Hey! I did not," Zhou Mi says, actually taking offense enough to respond, "Start dating you without your permission. I know you only had one drink when I kissed you, okay, so don't even start."

"Oh my God, you did," Kyuhyun whines. "I thought you were supposed to keep me from making bad decisions while I was inebriated."

Zhou Mi frowns. "I'm dating you to keep you from more bad decisions."

"I don't even know when our anniversary is," Kyuhyun gripes.

"Anyway," Zhou Mi continues, totally unfazed, "I'm ordering calamari for appetizers. Do you think Henry wants anything?"

"Herry likes pad thai," Kyuhyun suggests between making disgruntled noises.

("Oh my gosh, seriously, Cho Kyuhyun?" Sungmin says when Kyuhyun relays this to him - over phone, of course, because Kyuhyun can't be damned to actually walk over to their apartment anymore. CI always knew you were thick, but I didn't think you were that thick."

"I'm not - it's just - it snuck up on me, okay," Kyuhyun says.

"It snuck up on you. You've been living in his apartment for almost a month. Heck, you've been taking up space in his bed for over two months, and it 'snuck up on you'."

"Shut up. Actually, this is all your fault. If only you came to get me that one time I bought those stupid panda shirts, then none of this would've happened."

"Mmhm," Sungmin says, failing badly at pretending to be sympathetic. "Yes, it's quite tragic. I'm very sorry for you. Oh, by the way, can you pick up the last of your stuff sometime next week? I found someone to sublease your room."

"No." Kyuhyun deadpans.

"Okay, cool. How does Wednesday afternoon sound?

"...4:30. I have PChem."

"Great! I'll see you then. Oh, and by the way, I was thinking of getting me and Henry couple shirts too. What do you think of owls?"

"...Shut the fuck up.")

**Author's Note:**

> This is the [Protoss](http://www.jinx.com/starcraft/men/protoss_vintage_logo.html?catid=104&cs=2&csd=104) shirt I was talking about.


End file.
